October 2014

Today I am happy to announce https://spupgradehelper.codeplex.com/ is available for download. This project aims to smooth the “double hop” upgrade from MOSS 2007 to SP2010 to SP 2013 by reading a CSV of database targets and automating the Cmdlets needed for a consistent, repeatable, high quality, and fast process. Please leave a comment here or on CodePlex if you found this helpful. Cheers!

Project Description

Upgrading MOSS to SP2013 is a tedious process with many Cmdlets, especially if you have many databases. This script aims to help automate that process.

Given a CSV with SQL instance and content database names, this script offers Cmdlets to run upgrade steps across many databases all at once. No more TXT or XLS copy and paste madness. Simply populate the CSV, get familiar with UH* Cmdlets and upgrade with ease.

NOTE – Upgrade “set” is meant for running parallel workstreams. For example, two servers with SP2010 and two servers with SP2013. That way overall upgrade can be expedited by running database set “A” through the first SP2010 and SP2013 server while database set “B” runs on the second server.

Microsoft Upgrade Process

I’ve been learning about OData and wanted to record a quick getting started video with how to create a new WebAPI project, add OData Controller, and send HTTP CRUD operations. Below is an example using Adventure Works Departments with sample code, screenshots, and a 10 minute video introduction. Please leave a comment if you found this helpful. Thanks!

Downloads

Screenshots

I heard a lot about PowerMap and wanted to record a quick getting started video with how to download, screenshots, and play a sample XLSX workbook.

Background

The “Power” family of Business Intelligence features is getting a lot of attention at conferences, SharePoint Saturday, Channel 9, and social media. Personally I hadn’t worked hands-on with the features before. The idea is simple and practical – everyone uses Excel for data, so why not leverage that as the BI design surface?

Watch Video

Screenshots

I use Start-Transcript and Stop-Transcript on nearly all PS1 files I create. It’s a great way to troubleshoot and easily make detailed log files. PowerShell gives us Write-Host -ForegroundColor to make console output look snazzy with color. However, TXT output is flat by comparison without color coding.

Below I have sample code for adding <STYLE> and <DIV> tags to PowerShell Write-Host. This example uses Get-Process to highlight any process using more than 50MB RAM in yellow and 500MB RAM in red.

After renaming TXT to HTM, we can see with Internet Explorer highlights from Transcript logs after the script runs. Cool beans! Please leave a comment if you found this helpful.